“Oh,” I said, caught, “you’ll think it silly, but I was just practicing my Italian.”
“Your Italian, Franny? You make it sound like you already speak it! Well, tell Mom and Dad you want to learn it, and see if they’ll fit it into your schedule. Just imagine”—Val sighed all melodramatically—“going back home, and having to do homework, and activities, and Girls Chorus.” Then she picked up a menu and said, “God, Franny, you expect me to eat octopus when I’m in love?”
“You mean Polipo al Profumo…” I began, showing off my accent and knowing full well that it annoyed her I didn’t ask right away about the guy, whoever he was.
“Well, I just can’t eat when I’m feeling all light and breathless…”
“Oh.” I couldn’t imagine ever being in such an emotional condition that I wasn’t fond of eating. Especially here, at Sant Ambroeus!
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” she demanded.
“All right, Val. Who is he?”
“His name is Julian,” she said, with a proud lift of her head. “He has dark hair and blue eyes.”
“Oh,” I said. I did have to admit that was an attractive, and rare, combination.
Julian. I pondered the name. “Wavy dark hair,” she went on. “And deep blue eyes. And he was carrying a cello. Turns out he goes to Juilliard. That’s just about impossible to get into!”
“I know, I know.”
“You have to be, like, a genius—”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Well—it was right after I got out of ballet class. Oh, I’ll tell you about what happened in class later! But anyway. It was after class and I walked outside and went to sit down by that fountain they have, the big one that’s all lit up at night. I was just sitting there when I noticed this cute boy with a cello, and I started looking at him, and then he startedlooking at me too. And then he came over and talked to me!”
“What did he say?”
“‘Are you a dancer?’ is what he said.”
“And what did you say?”
“I said yes.”
“Val!”
“Whatever.”
“But you know he must just assume you’re a ballerina?”
She tossed her head and said, “Well, what of it? If you were a man, wouldn’t you fall in love with a ballerina?”
I had to admit she had a point. When it came to Love, ballerinas had the edge over the rest of us.
“Val, how old is he?” I asked.
“Twenty-one.”
Twenty-one! The perfect age, it seemed to me, for any cute boy to be. I thought it only appropriate that one’s first love should be a couple years older anyway. And definitely not younger: no way.
“How old does he think you are?”
“Well,” said Valentine, “I’m not exactly sure, but he thinks I go to the ballet school.”
I looked at Valentine sitting across from me, and I understood that she now lived in a different world from me. It was the world of being a beautiful young woman, a world in which dark-haired, blue-eyed strangers carrying cellos saw you and felt compelled to speak to you out of nowhere. And it was also a world, I saw, of small lies. But lies were important when one was in love. The truth, not so much. I saw that now.
Our food arrived: egg salad and tomato sandwiches, and ones with chicken salad and lemon zest. For tea, we got a pot of something called Vanilla Darjeeling Royal.
“You know what, Franny?” said Valentine, reaching for a sandwich and popping it into her mouth in one bite. I always take tiny bites of tea sandwiches, to make them last longer. “Maybe being in love is all right for your appetite after all. This looks delish.”
We ate our food and sipped our Vanilla Darjeeling Royal tea and were perfectly happy. One of those meals to remember, I was thinking. Aunt Theo was quite right to tell me to “take notes.” And afterward when we got back to the apartment I did. As I was writing up the afternoon’s events in my journal, for the first time ever I thought to myself that maybe someday I would write a novel too.
9
The Fifi or the Framboise?
“So you’re in love,” said Clover that evening. “Is it the first time?”
Valentine nodded gravely that it was.
“Well,” said Clover calmly, as if she were a priestess overseeing an initiation ritual of some kind, “then there is only one thing to be done.”
“What?”
We were both dying to know.
“Lingerie shopping, of course.”
Lingerie shopping! The words alone were enough to thrill us.
“Oh!” said Valentine. “Oh! Mom never lets me get fancy underwear. And you know what I want? Black lace, with, what are those things called, garters—”
“It might not be time for black lace just yet,” said Clover. “We’ll have to see. But we’ll get you something, and whatever it is, it will be beautiful.”